PowerPoint To Impress
This document builds on the information given in General Differences in Use between OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office by describing specific differences in use between Impress and PowerPoint. Accessing different views Impress provides equivalent views to those provided by PowerPoint. The main difference is that Impress gives you quick access to all of its views from the main window. The main window has three parts: the Slides pane, Workspace, and Tasks pane. The Slides pane ''allows you to do specific things to individual slides. The ''Workspace ''is where most of the work is done to create individual slides. The ''Tasks pane ''contains a group of four tasks which affect styles, the layout, animation, and transitions between slides in your presentation. http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/File:Doc_mig_impressmainwindow.png The views are summarized in Table 19. In PowerPoint the buttons for quickly changing the view are in the bottom left corner. In Impress the equivalent buttons are in the top center of the screen. In PowerPoint the ''Notes view is only accessible from the View menu. In OOo, the Notes view is accessible at the top of the editing area. To quickly access the Master Slide view in PowerPoint, you hold down the Shift ''key while clicking on the '''Normal View' button. This action can not be performed in OOo. Impress provides a Handout view ''for fine-tuning how handouts look. This is equivalent to (but more flexible than) PowerPoint's ''Handout Master option. Color gradients and borders Impress does not support some of the formatting features that PowerPoint does. For example it does not support three-color gradients, double and triple borders, or round-dotted borders. When importing PowerPoint slides, Impress changes three-color gradients to two-color, double or triple borders to single and round-dotted borders to square dots. To improve the results of the import, make any necessary adjustments in PowerPoint before importing files into Impress. Change three-color gradient fills to two-color. Change double or triple border lines to a single border line with suitable width. The round-dotted border lines that are mapped to rectangle-border lines, during import, will closely resemble the original line style in PowerPoint so that manual editing should not be necessary. Multimedia Narration Voice-over narration is not supported by Impress. There are no settings for multimedia custom animations, such as the ability to play a sound for the next few slides. Sound Sounds can be added in Impress using Insert > Movies & Sound, however sounds only play for the slide they associated with. You can not insert background music for the whole presentation in Impress. Chart animations There is no facility in Impress for Chart Effects, as there is in PowerPoint, such as presenting a series or category at a time. On import the charts simply appear. A workaround is to have multiple copies of the chart with each one set up to display as desired. A feature in OOo 2.0 can be selected from Insert > Animated Image to help in the creation of chart animations. It also allows you to group several still images into one animated image. Pack and Go This feature in PowerPoint allows a PowerPoint file to be saved to a CD, or split up over several floppy disks, and assures that all related files are included. This feature does not exist in Impress, nor can Impress open such files. Impress can export a show to a Flash file. PowerPoint can not. Fields Impress date fields are exported as text, so they do not automatically update. Fields are shown with a gray background when editing so that they are recognizable as fields. Action settings and interaction PowerPoint provides action settings (jump to slide, run program) for mouse overs. Impress does not have that option except on mouse click. Therefore PowerPoint mouse overs get mapped to mouse clicks. PowerPoint has an option for highlighting the object on mouse click or mouse over; Impress does not have that so it gets ignored on import. However you can click on Internet hyperlinks during a presentation. Animating a slide show Custom animations Impress has custom animations that are equivalent to custom animations in PowerPoint. Applying animations in Impress is very similar to PowerPoint. To access custom animations select either Slide Show > Custom Animation or click on the words Custom Animation ''in the task pane. To add an animation, select the object to be animated and then click '''Add'. A dialog box, shown in Figure 2, appears. http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/File:Doc_mig_customanimation.png You can choose between Entrance, Emphasis, Exit, and Motion Paths effects. If you scroll down the list you will find Basic, Moderate, Exciting, and Special as categories effects. Differences in animation effects On export or import of either Impress or PowerPoint files the names of the effects change. However, the result and appearance are essentially the same. See Table 20. Slide transition effects In the same way that object animations have a mapping between PowerPoint and Impress, slide transitions also have different names between the programs as summarized in Table 21. Table 21. Comparison of slide transition names between PowerPoint and Impress. Fitting text to a frame Fitting text to the frame, or a text box, in the two programs behaves differently. In PowerPoint, the program automatically resizes the font proportionally as the text exceeds the size of the text box. In Impress, if the option Fit to frame has been selected, the program allows text to be typed outside of the text box. When you select another object, signifying that typing has finished, Impress resizes the text as if it were resizing a picture. This often leads to compressed and unattractive text. The best way to avoid this effect is to keep the text within the text box. To change the Fit to frame property in Impress: #Click on the text frame to select it. #Right-click on the text area and select''' Text''' in the pop up menu. The Text dialog opens. http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/File:Doc_mig_fittoframe.png #On the Text tab are options to automatically adjust frame size or font size as follows: #*''Fit width to text'' resizes the text to fit the width of the drawing or the text object. #*''Fit height to text'' resizes the text to fit the height of the drawing or text object. #*''Fit to frame'' resizes the text to fit the entire area of the drawing or text object. To be able to check this option the other two options must be unchecked. Content on this page is from the authors of http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/.